Microsoft to Co-Chair New W3C Web Performance Working Group

Earlier this morning the W3C announced the formation of a new Web Performance Working Group chartered with making it easier to accurately measure web application performance. Enabling web developers to understand the real world performance characteristics of their applications is critical to the success of HTML5, and we’re excited to have been selected as co-chairs of the new working group alongside Google. We look forward to partnering with the W3C and the broader web community to enable these scenarios through an interoperable API.

The third Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview was the first browser to implement these portions of the WebTimings specification. Following standard conventions, we used a vendor prefix (ms) on the name because the specification was still under active development and hadn’t been brought into the charter of any working group. Google also recently provided an early implementation of these API’s inside Chrome using their vendor prefix (webkit). Through early collaboration between our engineering teams, we almost have interoperable implementations which is impressive for an API that has only been discussed for a few months. This is a great example of what’s possible through collaborative partnerships at the W3C.